At the double… Carter plays fast and loose with the confusions of twins.
Photograph: Image Source Plus / Alamy/Alamy

Two households, both in questionable and vacillating states of dignity. The first is the grand theatrical Hazard dynasty, whose patriarch is the roaring, brooding Melchior Hazard, a Shakespearian ham with a voice “as hot and strong as Bovril”. The second is the scrappy family cobbled together around the identical Chance twins, Melchior’s illegitimate daughters. Dismissed by their celebrity father, they are raised in Brixton by their dead mother’s landlady - a vegan naturist they call Grandma.

In his second household, the heart of the novel, the sisters caper along the breadline through sheer stubbornness. As Dora and Nora Chance grow up, they learn to sing and dance for their supper, and are watched over by a fairy godfather in the form of Peregrine Hazard, their father’s fraternal twin but emotional opposite. An impossibly affable giant of a man, he is the fatherless child’s dream, smothering the girls in gifts and kisses before disappearing on exotic and arcane adventures.

The betrayals, reunions and farcical cross-pollinations between these two families are the traffic of this 200-page novel, which doffs an upstart cap to the “upstart crow” himself: Shakespeare. If it is a salute, it is something of a two-fingered one, and Carter manhandles the Complete works with a peculiar kind of tough love. The plot involves five sets of twins, countless mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences, cross-dressing, bed-hopping and a final scene so incestuously erotic that it is more triumphant than disturbing (I’ll say no more).

Looking back on her lifetime in showbusiness from the vantage point of her 75th Birthday, our narrator-heroine Dora treats Shakespeare’s legacy - indeed the entire English language - with the irreverence of a mutinous auto-didact. At a Shakespeare-themed costume party she recalls spotting “Coriolanus stoutly buggering Banquo’s ghost under the pergola”: an image typical of the ribald delight the novel takes in the clash of sublime and ridiculous.

Though certainly not a godly book, Wise Children seems to me a Christmassy one, because it is largely about theatre and family. At heart, Christmas is a sort of family performance; a dramatised pantomime in which the loves and struggles of family life are played out in exaggerated splendour. At one point Dora describes theatre as “the person-to-person magic we put together with spit and glue and willpower”. She might equally have been talking about family.

It is easy to forget, in so riotous a novel, the sadness our heroine conceals: her father’s contempt, her lost loves, her dead friends, her loneliness, the descent of her career into cheap vaudeville and stripping. “Outside it was raining still, and the dark coming on”, she says in a heartstopping moment from the book’s third act, “I sometimes wonder why we go on living.” Carter was 50 when she wrote Wise Children, and knew she was succumbing to the cancer that claimed her the following year. It was her last book, but seldom has a writer gone less gently.

“I refuse point-blank to play in tragedy,” Dora asserts, and lo and behold a happy ending is conjoured from thin air. Characters thought dead appear in clouds of butterflies or leap from chests. Newborn babies are produced from coat pockets and long lives are miraculously extended.

The novel’s gift to the reader is to return us to the feelings of bliss and mystery not felt since we shelved our childish things. It is almost like a children’s book, only so wise, so filthy, so subversively learned that it reaches for something altogether more ambitious. Carter’s books are stuffed, rather bureaucratically, into the oddly-shaped pigeon-hole of “magic realism”, an incurious label almost comically at odds with her prodigal, disorderly style. “In the distance, in the zoo, over the waving treetops, the lions were roaring their hearts out,” she writes at the novel’s climax. The better term, maybe, is magic.